Amanda Seibæk
A simple path, the road ahead or ‘journey’ are often cited to describe our way through life. A human response to feel connected to others along the way, a route to self discovery, or a way to visualise staying on track towards a goal. Given the current intersection of challenges our planet faces; we probably all agree that making space for each other on the path; being kinder, more empathetic for example, should be a common goal. Love, joy, ambition for a fairer world, alongside all of the random things life throws at us, could be a more nurturing, collective journey. Seibæk’s work is a space to imagine these things, to pause, think and dream. She is challenging us metaphorically and literally through her paintings to go for a walk, to wander on the road we travel together.
Even when these imaginative routes remain deeply personal, and over a lifetime may remain hidden. To Seibæk they are landscapes shaped by people and ideas circulating in the air, ultimately binding us to each other. Human, land and nature are one, in Seibæk’s paintings the lines between are blurred, they melt, overlap, recede out of view. This abstraction involves representations of plants, seeds, rocks, dust, the elements intertwined with the human figure. The result is often a glimpse of a body; a stretched out hand, a hip morphing into a mountain, a human gesture tending to life. Seibæk’s paintings are painted on transparent voile. The stretcher is visible as a structure or ‘window’ laid bare behind the thin air like veil and brushstrokes. It exposes a grid behind the swirling poetics of the paint, a meeting point between the orderliness of an imaginary map and the messiness of quotidian life.
The transparency of Seibæk’s chosen surface is not to veil or conceal, but is an invitation to step into the landscape, real or imagined to look further than the canvas or the screen.
''Avenues' Seibæk’s well received first solo exhibition in the gallery, guided us via the sentimental cartography of an ancient french map the Carte de Tendre. This new body of work sees Seibæk looking to the sky; in the movement and migration of birds, Starlings in particular. In her largest oil painting on voile to date; ‘Murmurations’, Seibæk is taking the lead from one of the most dazzling displays in the natural world. Looking up in wonder at such a sight, we see the magic of the collective. Moving and changing direction together, a whole community dependant on each other of which we play a part.
Whether recounting the stations of love on an imaginary route or staring at the sky, Seibæk’s works are bisected by propositions to create a landscape of commonalities. In this presentation Seibæk draws upon the crossroads between actions, feelings, a sense of purpose, the pull of nature, and ultimately the pathways we choose along the way.